Wednesday, 17 June 2015

"Hamari Adhuri Kahani" (Guardian 15/06/15)

Western viewers tend
to regard blockbuster season as an exclusively English-language phenomenon,
which isn’t the case in this globalised moment. The 21st Century Fox
fanfare blares out before this new Hindi release; next week, the Disney-backed
sequel ABCD2 bounces onto our
screens. Anyone anticipating a degree of homogenisation in such multiplex-bound
ventures will likely be confounded by director Mohit Suri’s new throwback: this
is straight-faced hothouse melodrama, very much Bollywood trad, pitched at a
level Hollywood rarely pursues even in Nicholas Sparks flicks. It may provoke a
similar sniggering from the cheap seats.

Such films can yield
their own swooning pleasures: in irony-saturated 2015, it reassures the soul to
know the movies – and Hindi movies especially – are still keen to sell us the
image of a woman in a flowing sari running at full pelt through sand dunes, and
without packaging it in winking quotation marks. Yet Suri’s also testing the
modern audience’s willingness to suspend disbelief, and the material he’s
working with here – unfolding the happenstance-heavy mystery of a woman at the
mercy of the men around her – proves barely fit for this purpose, or any other
besides.

The woman, Vasudha
(Vidya Balan), is not long for this world: the film’s barely five minutes old
when she stumbles off a bus to expire on a dirtroad. A two-hour flashback
sketches an under-corroborated history of her personal relations – first with a
brutish hubby (Raj Kumar Yadav) suspected of terrorist activity; then with
Aarav (Emraan Hashmi), multimillionaire owner of the hotel she drudges within.
This Prince Charming whisks her to Dubai – that fairytale kingdom renowned for
throwing open its doors and arms to the fairer sex – to point out the stars in
the desert sky. This courtship is, of course, doomed.

Some of its floridity
is inbuilt. Vasudha’s job involves filling Aarav’s suite with lilies and
orchids; later, after she’s channelled Foreigner in imploring him to teach her
what love is, the pair are encircled by a sudden flurry of cherry blossoms –
you’d call it freak, were it not part of an overall strategy intended to
associate the heroine with such rare, delicate and perishable blooms. For
Aarav, Vasudha’s presence prompts memories – and therefore a flashback within a
flashback – of his own mother, a hard-scrabbling saloon singer. This revelation
should at least grab the attention of amateur psychologists; whether the film
can retain it is another matter.

Melodrama needs to be
watertight to earn our tears: the last notable Hindi example, 2013’s shimmering
O. Henry adaptation Lootera, had to
seal itself inside a period milieu to have the effect that it did. By contrast,
there are too many breaches in Suri’s narrative logic: given that the main
flashback encompasses Skype and selfies – not to mention prominent promotional
placements for various Middle East-associated brands – are we to assume that
the wraparound story takes place in India, thirty years hence? If so, why does
everything look identical to the present day?

Elsewhere, the
parallel between Vasudha and Aarav’s mother only holds if we see the former
doing everything possible for her boy; once she’s been removed to Dubai,
however, her kid vanishes for reasons never satisfactorily explained. The
frantic second half, in which hubby returns to civilisation a wanted man, and –
by way of cosmic reordering – Aarav sets out for a warzone, is almost all
sweeping gestures, unmoored from credible motivation; you can’t discern whether
it’s the film’s sincerity that has taken a dip, or the filmmakers’
intelligence.

If the Fox execs did
exert any influence, it might have been in the altogether romantic portrait of
tycoon Aarav as a brooding de Winter type, prepared to walk through minefields
to do right by his beloved. (James Murdoch: the gauntlet has been set down.)
Either way, Vasudha’s suffering provides a thankless role for Balan, obliged to
assume a perpetually crestfallen look while succumbing to her fate.
Mother-fixated company man or wild-eyed fundamentalist killer? Perhaps there
are women in this world who face comparably rotten life choices, but they – and
the rest of us – deserve better elaborated escapism than this.

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About Me

Mike was born in Warwickshire in 1978. He has written on film for The Scotsman since 2002, for The Telegraph since 2003, for The Guardian since 2012, and for the Reader's Digest since 2016. In the intervening years, he has appeared on Radio 4's "Today" programme and - with a degree of randomness befitting the man - BBC2's "Working Lunch". He has also contributed to the home-viewing reference guide "The DVD Stack" (Canongate, 2006; second edition 2007) and Halliwell's "The Movies That Matter" (HarperCollins, 2008).